Uncomfortable Truths About Indigenous Canadians on Truth & Reconciliation Day
Today's T&R Day requires more than blame. Let's explore what the Indigenous, Canada's perpetual children, can do for themselves
(Since Truth & Reconciliation Day comes one day before this week’s Wednesday publication date, I’m publishing today instead of tomorrow.)
One of the best-kept secrets in Canada is that Indigenous bands claim there are 6,000 graves of children in or around former ‘Indian’ residential schools. Yet, so far, and Canadians are surprised to learn this, confirmed by Google, they’ve found Not. One. Single. Body.
‘Deniers’ who snuck onto a former school property in British Columbia attempting to find some, were stopped by Natives.
The incident exemplifies the growing credibility problem for Canada’s First Nations. While we know children died—usually of common diseases in the pre-vaccine era—and are buried near the former schools, band leaders seem strangely incurious about producing some remains, especially in light of some of their more extraordinary claims of savage murders at the schools. You’d think they’d want to possibly prosecute still-living perpetrators, right?
Kimberly Murray, an independent special interlocutor for the alleged unmarked graves and burial sites, claimed ‘denialism’ is “the last step in genocide. Denialism is violence. Denialism is calculated. Denialism is harmful. Denialism is hate."
Denialism is what happens when you can’t or won’t provide evidence. ‘Genocide’ accusations are nothing more than an attempt to shut down legitimate exploration of these allegations.
Hellacious stories of abuse and neglect emerged from the residential schools during the Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s investigations over a decade ago. These horrors were detailed in a massive government report via former student testimony that made it sound like the entire residential school system was the ninth level of hell. For sure, many of these indignities did occur, sometimes and somewhere.
Others felt they got a good education from the schools, but the Truth and Reconciliation Commission weren’t much interested in their stories.
The mass graves/residential school hellholes debate defines much of what we think we know about most things Indigenous. In the woke world of progressive politics, one must never challenge anything an Indigenous person claims.
Today is Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada, and we’re going to ask some more uncomfortable questions.
Let’s reconcile with some real truths, shall we?
Last year for T&R Day, Substack writer Fortissax at Fortissax Is Typing wrote a lengthy and well-researched treatise about how violent pre-European North America was. James Pew, meanwhile, over at Woke Watch Canada, had critiqued the national myth that all the residential schools for ‘Indians’ were abusive hellholes and that no student emerged better, or more educated, than when they went in. (Truth is, many went on to lead successful, happy lives.) And I read two books this year: Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools) and Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation.
One truth is that many Canadian reserves are in atrocious condition, with many living in squalor—substandard homes, unclean water, insufficient or ridiculously expensive food (which has to be shipped from other parts of Canada to remote reserves without airports), high domestic violence, sexual abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, and all the other pathologies commonly associated with poverty.
If you ask the Indigenous leadership why, they’ll start droning on about white supremacy and racism and stolen land and ‘genocide’ and the ‘horrific’ residential schools and the Indian Act of 1876.
If you ask those living in squalor, many will fill your ears with complaints about how the money the Canadian government has given to improve reserve lives doesn’t seem to trickle down into those communities but man, the local leader sure is driving a nice shiny new truck.
Canada cares
Most Canadians don’t want to see anyone suffering or living in poverty on Canadian soil, and would genuinely love to see First Nations thrive.
Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry describes the problems facing Indigenous reserves customarily ignored in what it is still a primarily liberal-leaning country. Those at fault include Indigenous leaders, for whom keeping their people poor results in a rain of federal manna from Ottawa, and their white progressive allies whose job it is to kowtow, bow and scrape, and never, ever, question any Native claim, however outlandish.
But the fault at large lies with the mostly non-Indigenous ‘industry’, primarily lawyers and consultants, who receive obscene amounts of government money defending the Indigenous in court (land claims are THE best way to get rich), with the help of their kind-hearted progressive lapdogs.
Conservatives, liberals and moderates who ask whether that money might be better spent improving life quality on the reserves are immediately smacked down as racists, haters and fascists.
The reality is most critics, too, want to see Indigenous communities thrive and prosper. A huge obstacle, unfortunately, is the desire of both Indigenous afraid of progress, and Canadians who wish to preserve an antiquated way of life as a sort of living museum rather than help the people adapt and assimilate into our multicultural society.
Any suggestion that the Indigenous need to modernize or assimilate is met with hostile accusations of ‘cultural genocide’. But as the Fraser Institute notes, “Extensive research on both sides of the 49th parallel shows that the American tribes and Canadian First Nations who achieve a higher standard of living do so by getting involved in the marketplace and generating income for themselves— ‘own-source revenue’ in the vocabulary of Indigenous affairs.”
Because Canada has, at one time or another, attempted to 'rub out the Indian’ in Natives, and engaged in genuine cultural erasure, ‘cultural genocide’ has become the emotional rather than logical response. It’s not true anymore, and it’s detrimental to Indigenous self-determination to not explore how they can do both—preserve their culture while evolving with the new one, just like all of us have done. We don’t live like we did even twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, and we don’t want to.
Disrobing argues that First Nations need modern education and to give up cultural elements which don’t work for them anymore.
First Nations, just like us, already don’t live like their ancestors. Very few reserves, if any, bear no stamp of the White Man’s Modernism. Even their substandard pre-fab housing is an improvement over the homes of their ancestors. The Inuit at the Arctic Circle don’t feed themselves with hunting and fishing the way their ancestors did. They rely on the White Man’s Groceries flown in, which is why their food prices make current American groceries look like bargains.
The rest of the world has moved on and modernized. None of us make our own butter or dip our own candles like our ancestors. We embrace childhood vaccines, unless our parents belong to weird religious groups or listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Our libraries are in our pockets. And we sure as hell don’t rely only on TV for our news and entertainment anymore.
Modernization is how the Indigenous can thrive, which those who’ve embraced it can attest to.
Thousands of immigrants from other lands join Canada every year and know they’re expected to assimilate while preserving their cultures however they want. They see the benefits of taking a job in technology, or medicine, or starting their own business, which they might not be able to do back home. They still celebrate Diwali, wear a hijab to work, take the Jewish holidays off, eat what they like.
No one is stopping Canada’s Indigenous from doing the same.
There’s no sound, rational reason why they can’t live in the modern world, whether by living self-sustainably on reserves without depending on regular government handouts like children, or modernize.
No one is stopping them, but they can’t expect Canadians to support them in perpetuity.
Disrobing asks the huge question that too many Canadians won’t, at risk of accusations of being a ‘genocidist’.
What can Indigenous Canadians do to help themselves?
Marginalized groups too often contribute to their own suffering by refusing to release cultural elements that no longer serve them, or question anything they believe about themselves.
It’s time to speak freely about what Indigenous Canadians can do:
Time to close the museum
Disrobing examines this at length. First Nations’ ancestors were still at the level of subsistence living when the European conquerors appeared, more technologically advanced, healthier and stronger. The Natives never stood a chance.
Subsistence living has been much romanticized by many generations of freethinkers, hippies, back-to-earthers, and environmentalists. The plain fact is that native North Americans lived shorter and exceedingly violent lives pre-European, exacerbated by ‘kinship’, another ancient tradition they need to bury. It meant higher levels of violence, since if you weren’t related to someone else, a Best Practice was to kill them before they killed you. Today, we live in societies in which we may not even know our neighbors but we don’t suspect them of evil intent, so we don’t plan murders either.
If ‘land acknowledgements’ were honest, every single band and tribe in North America would offer their own, acknowledging whose land theirs belonged to before they stole it. Genuine subsistence living also results in death and suffering from preventable diseases, childhood deaths, and poor dental health.
Indigenous leaders must account for government money
The First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA) was passed in 2013 by Parliament to require financial accountability for First Nations band leaders and chiefs after media stories detailed their very nice salaries while their people languished on reserves. Needless to say, this act wasn’t popular with the leaders who argued it was ‘discriminatory’ and ‘unconstitutional’. Justin Trudeau, who never met a special interest group whose asses he wouldn’t kiss, refused to enforce it.
Own their non-conquest-related problems
The only one of Indigenous problems that originated with the White Man was alcoholism. Already present was the universal culture of patriarchal entitlement to women’s and childrens’ bodies. Unsurprisingly, rape and child rape have always been a part of the universal tradition where men with too much power, to be blunt, fuck women and children without their consent.
As detailed by the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley and others, traditional male violence is universal. Rape, sexual abuse of children, women as spoils, spousal abuse—they were as omnipresent in Indigenous communities then as they are today. Disrobing delves heavily into the sexual abuse and coverups on reserves, identical to off-reserve communities anywhere else.
They’re enabled, of course, by their witlessly progressive patriarchal allies who never demand sexual accountability from any other than white men.
Violence and domestic abuse are on the Indigenous, not the White Man. They need to stop blaming us and ‘do the work’.
Traditional ‘medicine’ is pseudoscience
Not a single one of Native ‘traditional medicines’ will cure cancer or relieve or slow the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Instead of embracing modern medical treatments that work, too many First Nations promote long-outdated ‘medicine’ treatments hoping to receive more monetary compensation (of course) for ‘intellectual property rights’ via the uncritical academic institutional support it gets for ‘ethnobotanical’ research. It’s just one of many traditional values that hold them back. Native ‘medicine’ was all their distant ancestors had; today’s aboriginals have a choice, which is to live long or die young, depending on how badly they want to emulate their ancestors. This is another waste of Native time and taxpayers’ money which does nothing to improve their lives.
Restore Western education
The biggest truth today’s Canadian Natives must acknowledge is that they are, in essence, Canada’s loser kids stuck perpetually in the basement constantly asking for handouts but frittering it away on land claims and other wastes of money that don’t serve them, along with an unwillingness to modernize. Non-native Canadians acknowledge that many gross injustices have been committed against their ancestors but, like nonsensical ‘slave reparation’ arguments, it was a long time ago and no different from how they treated each other pre-European.
Perhaps the first step, now that we’ve got a new Prime Minister, is to start enforcing the FNFTA Act. Forcing financial accountability at the top would be a huge first step in evolving the too-prevalent dependency mindset of Canada’s perpetual children.
It’s 2025, not 1625. On Truth & Reconcilation Day, Canada’s Indigenous can commit themselves to becoming self-sustaining adults.
It’s time to grow up, and move out of their parents’ house.
When I’m not thinking about what better, less racist Canadian education would look like for our First Nations, I help women and others take back their power here at Grow Some Labia.
👏👏👏 A tour de force, Labia the best of all your articles, yet! A message that is politically incorrect but very much needed to be heard. This Truth and Reconciliation Day, the Canadian nation needs to commit itself to telling the FULL truth in all its complexity about the history of the Indigenous people of Canada and their relations with the settlers and the First Nations people to commit themselves to assimilate, join modern society and join into the white man’s free-market capitalist system and stop living in the past. Indigenous bands claim that there are mass graves around the old Residential Schools. But no evidence has ever been found of this. Native activists and politicians claim that denying this is a form of “erasure.” No, it’s not erasure, it’s the fact that you’ve produced no hard evidence of this claim at all. Yes, some genuine instances of abuse and neglect did happen in some Residential Schools. But in some of the Residential Schools everything was fine and the students said they had a good experience and got a great education. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission undoubtedly seeking media attention and headlines, ignored the accounts of these students.
We know there were Indian children who tragically perished from diseases we can easily cure today, buried near the school. No mass graves of students who been intentionally murdered were ever found. The fact of the matter is, the victimhood mindset and identity politics have done the First Nations peoples no good. The reserves they live on are a mess where they live in squalor, in substandard homes, unclean water, insufficient or ridiculously expensive food, and high rates of domestic violence, sexual abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, and all other pathologies commonly associated with poverty. Indigenous leadership will naturally blame this on racism, white supremacy, their land being “stolen”, the “horrific” residential schools, and the Indian Act of 1876.
But if you talk to ordinary Indigenous Canadians, they’ll tell you the truth. The real culprit for their plight is their corrupt tribal government who takes most of the money the Canadian government gives the tribes and uses it to line their own pockets. They use the atrocities of the past to cover up and distract from the corruption of the present. They rub salt on the wounds of the past to distract their people and the Canadian public from the bad things they’ve done. The vast majority of Canadians care deeply about the plight of the First Nations people. They want to help them all they can. But the problem is the tribal leaders, lawyers and consultants who get rich off “pimping” so to speak the Native people’s plight. All with the help of their well-intentioned and gullible white progressive allies who are good little stooges and keep their mouths shut and let the red man speak.
Those across the spectrum who rightly point out that money would be better spent improving the quality of life on reservations are slapped down and called racists. Any suggestion at all that the indigenous people of Canada need to modernize or assimilate is met with incredulousness and accusations of “cultural genocide.” Did erasure of Native culture “rubbing out the Indian” so to speak, happen in the past? Of course. But that’s not what’s happening now. Native Americans and Native Canadians who get involved in the marketplace and generating income for themselves are much, much better off then their brethren living on reservations still staying true to their “traditional lifestyle.”
Disrobing is the way to go! Indigenous Canadians need to get a modern education and get rid of aspects of their culture that don’t work for them anymore. They already do live the modern world in some ways. They in many ways already don’t live like their ancestors. For example, their substandard housing is better then the primitive dwellings their ancestors lived in. The Inuits for example, have their food flown in from the white man’s grocery stores. Thus why their food prices makes average food prices in America look like bargains by comparison. The rest of the world has moved on. We don’t churn butter, sew our own clothing or use wells to get our water anymore. It’s time for the First Nations people need to come into the modern world!
They need to modernize and assimilate just like million of immigrants who come to Canada do every year. They need to enter the free-market economy: work at regular jobs, earn money for themselves and start their own businesses. The Canadian government need to crackdown on corruption on the reserves and clean them up and make them decent places to live. Government subsidies they get should be made temporary. Bad tribal leaders need to be voted out of office. Subsistence living and kinship need to be scrapped and left in centuries past where they belongs. Freethinkers, Hippies, back-to-earthers, and environmentalists need to drop the “Noble Savage” attitude towards how First Nations peoples lived in the past. It was an awful period, they murdered, enslaved, abused, and raped each other and conquered each other’s land. The European conquerors were indeed more technologically advanced, healthier and stronger thus why they defeated them in battle and Canada exists today.
FNFTA needs to be enforced as well! There’s nothing racist about financial transparency. They’re just using racism as an excuse to cover up their corruption and stealing from their own people. They indeed, also need to own their non-conquest related problems. I briefly touched on this above, but as the Anthropologist Lawrence Keeley discovered, the First Nations people were no angels before the arrival of the European settlers. They committed traditional male violence, sexual abuse of children, took women as spoils, spousal abuse, rape, child rape, murder, and other horrendous things. In other words, they were just as human as and no better or no worse than, anyone else. The documentary Disrobing chronicles sexual abuse and cover-ups on reserves. Their white progressive allies never demand sexual accountability from them the way they would white men. That’s their fault not white peoples’. Furthermore, traditional Native medicines are pseudo-science and can’t replace modern medicine. They may have been all their ancestors had, but they have a choice.
“Trust the science!” Progressives proclaim at the top of their lungs to anyone who will listen-except when it comes to Indigenous people, then science is irrelevant and racist. I’m sorry, some roots, berries and prayers can’t replace Tylenol, Penicillin, modern surgery, chemotherapy, antibiotics, or antidepressants. Indeed, the First Nations people are the deadbeat moocher children who live in their parent’s basement and they need to come join the modern world. Native Americans and the First Nations’ people’s lives can be massively improved by the following:
1) Enter the modern world and modernize and assimilate. This needn’t mean they give up their culture which they can certainly preserve.
2) Teaching them empowerment, self-autonomy and patriotism and to be capitalists.
3) Reform and clean up the reservation and reserve systems.
4) Abolish all government agencies that deal with indigenous people.
5) Make all Indian welfare programs temporary.
TMU, baby! Just up the street from Sankofa Square.
Tear it all down. Build new, build better, build the future.
P.S. I'm perfectly comfortable about these truths you exposed. In fact, I'm comfortable with ALL things true. I only squirm when you and your confederates generate and propagate lies in order to further your goal of creating heaven on earth (with humans instead of angels...).